The Sandman

There've been a fair few characters over the years that have gone by the name Sandman. There was the Golden Age one with the sleep gun and the opera cape, then Simon and Kirby's generic crime buster with obligatatory sidekick Sandy, and lastly, Neil Gaiman's epic pretension fest, beloved of female Goths everywhere.
But in between was this one, a return to the title, if not the concept for the Simon & Kirby team.
This Sandman is the Universal Master of Dreams, protecting the little kids of the world against nightmares from inside his Dream Dome, with the help of spooky buddies Brute and Glob. He's very much a make-believe character like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, spending his time looking in on lonely orphan Jed and his kindly grandfather on remote Dolphin Island.
The first issue was meant to be a one-off but the Doyen of Dreams returned a year later for a regular series, this time scripted by Michael Fleisher, and with art from Ernie Chua / Chan and Mike Royer, with Ernie doing his best Kirby impression, particularly on the patented blocky hands.

Fleisher, a man not overly known for feelgood fantasy, couldn't wait to get rid of Jed's grandpop as soon as he could, and placed the boy with an abusive aunt and uncle by issue five,  presumably to up the fairytale quotient of the strip.
As zombie gorillas, invading frog-men and a mini-me version of Doc Ock all pop up, The Sandman is a sprawling glorious mess of a comic, and a barrel load of fun.
In fact, as Jed nightly adventures with his magical friends, what you're getting is an almost perfect kids' bedtime book.

Kirby was back full-time for issue four, but the writing was on the wall, with fans possibly seeing the series as too juvenile for any kind of longevity.
It did go out on a major high however, with Wally Wood joining Kirby for this last issue, and Dr. Spider, the hapless would-be master of evil, returning with yet another cunning scheme to take over the world. Curses and double curses!

Wally Wood's The Curse

An adult fairytale from Wally Wood now, surely his favourite genre, and courtesy of Vampirella #9. This one actually contains what might be my favourite page of his ever. It's p.5, where he guides you through the action in a way I don't think I've ever seen since, and certainly never had before. 'Course, he may well have swiped it, so everybody steal this technique now, 'cos as Woody said himself: 'Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.'
Mind you, we're not Wally Wood, so it probably wouldn't work for us...

Wally Wood's MAD Comic Opera

Hanno's been on ( as Mark & Lard used to say ), with a request. Nefarious Neil Hansen would like to see Frank Jacob & Wally Wood's comic opera from the July 1960 issue of Mad.
Well, I need as little excuse to post stuff by Woody as you do to read it, so let's join Dick Tracy & Tarzan ( alongside just about every other newspaper strip character of the time ) in the Ape Man's search for love. You're gonna want to pore over every panel.

Wally Wood's Plucked!

A quick detour back to the '50's today, with one of EC's ( and Wally Wood's ) greatest. It's co-written by EC founders Bill Gaines & Al Feldstein, as nearly all their material was, and coloured by a young Marie Severin.
Plucked is, if you think about it, one of the most terrifying things you'll ever read. Really. How do you know, for sure, that this isn't happening to you right now?

Sally Forth

Sally Forth was Wally Wood's good girl strip for The Overseas Weekly, a paper that, like it sounds, was distributed to Army bases throughout the world. It started in 1968, and ran alongside Woody's spy adventure strip Cannon. The brief for both strips being simple: Woody could draw whatever he liked, so long as there was a naked girl on every page.

Cannon was more difficult, as an ostensibly 'serious' piece, to continue to come up with reasons for female characters to lose their clothes, but Sally was designed as a romp from day one, and resembles a naughty version of Woody's work on the early Mad's.

Sally is the original happy, dumb sexist male fantasy without a single thought in her head, but unlike some of the darker parts of Cannon, is impossible to be offended by. Bouncing around from one genre parody to another, accompanied by pals The Co-ed Commandos, it's just a frothy, good hearted piece of fun. Here's one of the more family friendly pieces, where the gang meet up with the old Universal monsters, and their arch nemesis, ( and real star of the strip ) the hapless & hopeless Captain Meno. Trust me, this guy's as persistent as Wile E. Coyote.